Pakistan's top civilian and military leaders on Sunday opened a new international trade route by seeing off a Chinese ship that's exporting goods to the Middle East and Africa from the newly built Gwadar port.
The first convoy of Chinese trucks arrived in Pakistan amid tight security using a road linking Gwadar to Kashgar in northwestern China.
China is building a network of roads and power plants under a project known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC.
The network is expected to facilitate 46 billion US dollars-worth of Chinese investment in the coming decades.
The project is also an extension of China's "One Belt, One Road" initiative and encompasses a series of infrastructure, power and transport upgrades that Islamabad hopes will kick-start its long-underperforming economy.
For more on this, Zheng Chenguang and Lincoln Van der Westhuizen spoke earlier to Jia Xiudong, Senior Research Fellow from China Institute of International Studies and Shahid, our colleague from CRI Urdu service.
